


Prey

by Periwinkles



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-14
Updated: 2020-03-14
Packaged: 2021-02-28 22:02:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23134360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Periwinkles/pseuds/Periwinkles
Summary: Six months after Rome, Eve Polastri and Villanelle / Oksana Astankova are trying to live apart and resist the relentless magnetism that draws them together, with explosive consequences.
Relationships: Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 9
Kudos: 53





	Prey

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lostgirl966](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lostgirl966/gifts).



She hadn’t noticed the moment when she stepped into winter, she just finds herself there, now, inhabiting this space of no past and no future; just a figure in red trudging through a gently undulating winter landscape at the edge of a vast frozen lake. Eve Polastri has no idea where she is or how she came to be here. She is wrapped tightly in a coat with a fur lined hood, but there is no rain and the air is dry, so she lets her black and brown curls bounce freely around her shoulders. A piercing cold has settled into the bones of her naked, fisted hands. Her thighs and calves burn hotly as she lifts her knees in exaggerated, lunging steps through the knee-deep snow. 

Eve thinks she should really feel warmer. Her frame is small, and her legs are slim, but the padding of the red coat and a pair of fleece-lined navy cargo trousers make her look bigger. The cuffs of her cargo trousers are tucked tightly into her socks. Her feet are dry and protected, yet the tips of her toes are starting to numb. 

The darkness makes the snow look pale pastel blue, she thinks. The stars above scatter diamonds of white light across the smooth crust before her. The air is so still here. Thin and silent. The only movement in the mid-night is Eve; the only sounds are her clumsy lunges and her breath. She dips her chin slightly, her eyes scanning the drifts ahead for fear of falling. When her dark irises flick sidelong to the lake edge on her right, she can see that the partially frozen surface of the water is twinkling. Her eyes flick back to focus on her task, though she doesn’t really know what that task is. This snow is virgin snow, a smooth unspoiled causeway gently and endlessly embracing the lake edge. To her left, cupping the winter shoreline, a dense wall of pine stretches upward. The lower limbs of the trees are bending under snowy burdens, yet the crowning tip of each tree remains upright; green arrows aiming toward the starry sky. A glowing, dancing band of those stars are scattered across the clear dark canvas. The light is enough to illuminate a snow-capped mountain far in the distance beyond the forest, vast and unreachable. Eve is hopelessly, helplessly lost. 

The snow level rises abruptly, and the raised elevation continues for the next twenty yards. Eve may not know where she is going, but she sure as hell is going to get there. Her expression hardens in determination as she stops to tuck her fists up into the cuffs of her coat and then, butterflying a trough on the surface with her arms to help clear the way, she pants, kicks and lunges her way through the drift. Heavy lumps of snow roll and fan outward around her as she swims. Just as the snow level slopes back to knee level, she begins to feel light-headed. A kind of drunken exhaustion is bearing down on her. 

“I’m so tired,” she tells the night. She has a nagging stitch in her left side, it’s not unbearable but it is present; a mild but insistent pulled string. Eve’s vision starts to seem hazy, shades of blue coalesce, diamonds and arrows smudge as her lungs struggle. “This…this is bullshit,” Eve hisses brokenly as she sways to a stop, pinching the stitch in her side through the padding of her coat. 

Her chest labours to suck in gulps of frigid air, but either through exhaustion or the cold her diaphragm won’t relax enough to let her lungs fully expand. The muscle nestled in Eve’s ribcage screams hungrily but remains taught and each hitched breath she takes is expelled by the pressure from her body, all too quickly, condensing in the air, treacherously out of reach as she fights to make each inhalation longer and deeper than the last. 

Recovery comes with time, gradually. As her pulse slows down and her vision and mind clear a little, Eve begins to study her surroundings in more detail. The lake is not endless after all. Peering to her right across the dark expanse of liminal space between the surface of the lake and the sparkling blanket of sky, Eve can just make out the thin white line of the opposite shore. _Only just._ It must be miles away, but it is there, present and undeniable; and as distant and inaccessible as the mountain top. She sees now that the lake is twinkling in mirror image of the shimmering sky. Despite its emptiness, despite the cold, there is profound beauty here; Eve can feel it.

A Sound. 

Eve hears soft sinking, something taking gentle, sighing steps near the shallower snow to her left. Eve is not alone. Something resting deep in the centre of her chest starts to plunge heavily. She turns her head slowly and levelly back toward the source of the sound. There, emerging from the black forest edge, a large dog inches out with purpose from beneath bowed limbs. It takes a moment to shake and oscillate its body violently dislodging and ejecting drops of white slush and pointed green needles from long guard hairs. It stills; posture held horizontal, hackles raised, and nose pointed toward Eve; a drawn bow. Eve twists at the waist and drags her left foot round and back, sliding her gait wider and realigning toes, legs and body to face the dog. She stills. With halted breath her body tightens with coiled potential energy preparing her muscles for fight or flight. Her mind races to assess the danger, taking in the creature before her. 

She can see now that this is a strange looking dog. It is too narrow chested; thick maned but also streamlined. Its forelegs are too long, held too close together and planted in huge five-toed front paws. Its ears are wide, but also too short, and the rounded points packed full of fur on the inside. Its tail is too long and bushy, hanging in a curve, swept and curling up between the hind legs. Uncommonly dense fur on the front quarters graduates in length as it spreads upwards to circumnavigate the neck and shoulders forming a crest. This is a wolf. A grey wolf. Some of Eve’s breath escapes from between her teeth but something inside her commands her not to flee. _Don’t run_.

Woman and wolf regard each other levelly, the moment stretching out like elastic. White fur, smooth and bright, covers legs, underbelly and lower-flank, then merges into a thicker mixture of pale greys along mid-flank and hips; a slightly darker grey follows upwards to meet a dark blue-black strip of course guard hairs that swipe a raised stripe the length of the creature. The stripe begins from a true-black widow’s peak of fur that points to the centre of the wolf’s head above its eyes and travels, unbroken, to the tip of its tail. The wolf’s stubby, rounded triangle, black-tipped ears stand forward whilst majestic black eyeliner flicks out and up exotically to meet them. This young wolf appears healthy, strong and vibrant.

They are perhaps fifteen yards apart, and Eve’s black gaze is ensnared by the wolf’s amber eyes. Eve’s thoughts chatter nervously in her mind, warning her that she should try not to appear confrontational, but she can’t look away, she can’t escape the wolf’s stare. The knowledge that this wolf is female presents itself in Eve’s mind, despite the lack of any overtly visible identifying sexual characteristics. Eve just knows. She smiles nervously. “She-wolf,” Eve addresses her, unintentionally bestowing her with a name. 

Shewolf’s muzzle cracks open a slither and gleaming white points peek out. She releases a low, lengthy, rumbling growl; a distant roll of thunder from Shewolf’s mouth to Eve’s ears. _This is a predator_ , Eve reminds herself internally, _she is a wild creature, a killing machine that preys on weaker beings for survival_. There are no clocks in this place; no ticks, no chimes, no bells, but she feels time pass and Shewolf makes no move to close the gap between them. Silently, wolf and woman wait through the impasse. _She’s waiting for something_.

Eve’s breaths start to deepen. Her arms, which had gone ridged and straight by her side release a little; the tension seeps out from her body like sweat and her shoulders drop. She sighs audibly and her head ticks from side to side almost imperceptibly. A creeping familiarity engulfs her slowly. Is it because Eve spent an entire spring break during her college years watching National Geographic and had learned more about wolves than she would ever need to? She dug in her memory to recall some facts. Wolves mated for life. They generally lived in small packs consisting of the mating pair, their pups and juvenile offspring. Eventually, mature offspring would leave to search for their own mate and start a new pack. Packs hunted cooperatively, mostly, with each small familial group engaging the prey as a team. 

Shewolf stands alone. _Was she separated from her pack? Does she stalk her prey alone? Or is she looking for her mate?_ “Have you stalked me here?” It’s almost a whisper, but white points and Amber eyes give no answer, only warning. 

Surprisingly, Eve’s initial startled anxiety has dissipated, and now a tight little pang of excitement throbs urgently from deep in her stomach. They are pulled together, this wolf and she, drawn into each other’s orbit. Shewolf’s growl rolls out continually in her direction but Eve is locked in her wide hazel gaze. Eve’s body gives a slight, distracted jolt as another sound starts to form around them, to intrude on this shared moment. It’s music. Really awful music threatens their solitude and it’s filtering to Eve’s ears from far away, growing louder as it wraps around her and takes hold. Suddenly she feels a snap. Time slides and her body shifts as she is plucked out of Now to Then. 

She’s in her cramped dorm room in Connecticut. A tacky, sensationalist title screen beams the words PREDATORS OF NORTH AMERICA, dripping and blood-red against black, from a small TV perched on an end table. The intro is accompanied by some cheesy synthesiser rendition of a piece of late 80s heavy metal music. Blessedly, Eve doesn’t hear it for too long because the music fades out as the camera pans across a tundra and the narrator begins.

_“Contrary to their reputation, interior grey wolves, though competent and skilled hunters, are known to shy away from human beings, reacting in much the same way as desert cats do to people. When startled by a sudden loud noise or when stalked by an adversary who appears both confident and dominant, they flee._

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_“In pre-colonial times, the indigenous population stalked and speared these powerful creatures for their furs, a valuable and precious resource necessary for human life. These first settlers regarded the wolf with respect, only ever taking what they needed to survive._

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_“Nowadays, despite scant evidence for lupine overpopulation or large-scale economically damaging losses to domestic livestock, wolves are resented and stigmatised. All across the northern territories they are prize targets for trappers who use snares to bag the most rare and beautiful pelts for profit; game hunters trek through the snow for miles to surround and shoot them for sporting honours; and organised aerial patrols chase packs across the wide-open landscape from above, safe in their planes, as they train their long-range rifles on the beasts. When carefully considered, it begs the question: who is the predator here, and who is the prey?”_

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The focused eyes of a grey wolf look out of the TV and stare into Eve’s soul. The voice of the narrator begins to float away ethereally as Eve’s ears train on the growl, and eventually that’s all she can hear. A snap. A slide. She shifts again. The dorm room is gone, the TV is gone, the narrator is gone. Eve is present in the winter and the wolf has not moved an inch. _She’s waiting for me_.

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Instinct kicks in. Eve maintains eye contact with Shewolf and carefully, calmly, bends one leg at the knee. Her left foot lifts up and out from its snowy burrow and she allows her leg to glide forward, cutting a trench through the snow to plant her foot firmly, and deliberately, one step closer to Shewolf. Shewolf side-steps to Eve’s right and starts and clockwise circle around her and Eve spins with her. It’s a sort of dance but it only lasts the time it takes Shewolf to complete one full orbit of Eve. _Enough_. Much to the surprise of both herself and the wolf, Eve decisively takes another, much wider, forward step into Shewolf’s space. There is short grunt of alarm and a nervous flurry of movement as four paws jig backward in a tight semi-circle. Shewolf arcs herself away from Eve just enough to restore the distance between them, where she stops and waits, alert, eyeing Eve suspiciously. Shewolf’s sudden skittishness encourages Eve. This time she lifts her left hand up in front of her body and places her palm flat against her chest as she takes another step into the void. Wide lupine eyes dart to the side and back just once. Then Shewolf gives a single bark and stamp of her front paws in annoyance. The break in eye contact happens so quickly that it barely registers within Eve at first, but once it does, she understands immediately; she knows this tiny action is both involuntary and avoidant. It’s a switch; a power shift between them. “I know you,” Eve whispers, and Shewolf is shuffling her weight now, alternating the burden from one front paw to the other and back uncertainly. “I see you.” Eve drops her raised hand. “And you see me.”

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Eve’s mouth cracks open. She thinks she is going to smile but then her top lip ticks up at one side to display her own gleaming white fangs, blunted but still somehow savage. Aroused from slumber in some dark and wild recess within her, trapped behind a locked door, a low, vibrating growl punches through and rumbles forth. Shewolf’s posture changes instantly, her head drops lower on her shoulders as black-tipped ears flatten forward at Eve, two compasses pointing North. For several long moments Shewolf listens tensely but attentively to the storm rolling across the gulf between them. Abruptly, she tilts her head as if in recognition of something, like she has spotted kin; a twin, reflected back at her through a veil of still and crisp clear water. Charged muscles seem to shift and loosen, she licks her muzzle a few times, increasingly passively, and then sits down on her haunches. Stillness. Eve allows her growl to become less insistent; thinner and softer until finally it ceases completely. Far from fleeing, Shewolf stands again and bows down on her front paws and back up. She is unsure if this is a greeting or a submission, but Eve feels a surge of triumph and huffs out a breathy laugh. 

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The absurdity of the situation she is in right now is astonishing. Lost in this vast barren space, she has been trudging through the snow to nowhere only to halt and stare down a wolf. A beautiful, free, wild wolf. Eve tilts her own head, her eyes roaming over soft, silky fur. She sighs. She doesn’t know what is going on. Shewolf is sitting regarding Eve again so she sighs. “Do you want to stay here for a bit?” she asks, not knowing why. _Why is this so familiar? Where is she? What is happening?_

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Eve shakes the thought away and refocuses on Shewolf, her eyes excited and roaming again. “You’re so beautiful”, she tells her in a quiet gasp. Shewolf’s tail doesn’t exactly wag, but it does twitch. A floppy pink tongue lolls out of one side of her mouth for a second before she is distracted by something behind her left front leg, she nudges her snout under the leg and starts sniffing, absently at first but then with rising focus and then some urgency. Eve watches this patiently as Shewolf grows increasingly fixated by her own scent. Eve’s brow knits, the sniffing continues. Eventually Eve’s eyebrow quirks and parted lips form an amused lop-sided smile at this display of Shewolf’s enthusiastic self-regard. “Oh, your pits smell that good, huh?” Eve teases. _What a gorgeous goofball_ , Eve thinks as she sniggers, but then a thin, high-pitched whine breaks through Eve’s confused mirth. That annoying stitch in Eve’s side gives her a quick pinch but she ignores it because Shewolf has rocked back on her haunches now, twisting her body and stretching her left leg out awkwardly. Shewolf is trying to reach something on the left side of her belly, she struggles ungracefully to maintain her balance and whines again just as Eve catches the flash of blackness. 

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Eve inches forward, peering through the night. The blackness is wetness, it shines like oil, and then it suddenly dawns on Eve that it is not black at all, but very deep red. A sudden liquid horror cascades in Eve’s chest. It’s blood. “You’re wounded?” Eve’s stunned question is loud, but Shewolf doesn’t hear her in her quest to reach the wound. Eve stumbles across the gulf to Shewolf. She skids and slides to her knees in the snow before her. “Hey, hey, hey,” she chants as her cold hands connect with warm fur, palms clasping around Shewolf’s ruff. Shewolf strains to reach the wound and lick the blood away, and when she fails, she whines pitifully up at Eve. That familiarity again, Eve has been looked at this way before; implored by pleading eyes full of hurt. A compulsion to help overcomes Eve and her searching vision snags painfully on the origin of Shewolf’s cries. _It hurts_. A nudge on Eve’s consciousness; a memory, faint and from far away pricks and then hides, and the echo of it makes her wince. She takes a few breaths and tries to chase and grasp those gasped words, to find their meaning, but they are shifting and slippery, and so they slide away from her like water through her fingers. Eve lets the water go and instead clutches Shewolf’s fur.

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Bark-stripped and sun-bleached, clinging tightly to the livid dark red stain is a short piece of broken branch. Hoping the wood is just stuck to congealed blood Eve tentatively uses the tips of her fingers to sweep a portion of wet fur back. Shewolf’s anxious whine sings high and soft against Eve’s ear as she probes. Eve lets out a hiss when she spots it. The piece of wood is split, primary and secondary branch diverge, a thin spoke juts out at an acute angle from the main branch, spearing through skin and hooking into the flesh. “Oh my God!” Eve exclaims, fingers still pressed to Shewolf’s underbelly. Her pupils dilate, her black eyes swirl up and lock onto amber. Shewolf’s tethered, begging eyes are wide and glassy as she struggles to stifle a growl. “Hold on, hold on,” Eve pants. “Uh…” She places the back of her left palm firmly above the split. “It’s OK.” Shewolf snarls. “Oh… I got you, I got you…” Eve takes a large breath and seizes the branch. “I’m gonna get it out, wait…” But Shewolf’s eyes plead fearfully for her to stop and growls anxiously. Eve exhales shakily and scissors her trembling fingers to straddle the point where the stick forks into two. Quivering and pursing her lips in fierce concentration, she funnels her breath back out between her lips and tucks her fingers downwards. She slides the back of her right hand down and behind the stick, and with one shocking and final gasp she grips tightly and slides the branch out from the flesh. Eve’s pull is swift and accurate; her hand arcs up and back towards the wound following a bend in the wood, but still the sharp tip is so hooked it snags the skin as it comes out and Shewolf snaps an anguished yelp of pain in Eve’s ear. Eve tosses the stick behind her body as if it burns her own flesh. Bright fresh blood oozes from the puncture. Everything seems to slow as drips of it fall like red feathers, connecting, pooling into liquid again then gently seeping into the snow. Eve looks at her bloody palms and a cold, unnameable feeling comes over her as Shewolf whines and limps away from her. She catches herself on her palms. “Wait!” _Don’t run away_. Eve tilts forward on her knees, and the pine needles dig into her hands, but she doesn’t feel it. Eve lifts her chin and uncurves her spine using her fingers as leverage. Rocking back, she sits on her heels, eyes scanning Shewolf, assessing her condition. “Oh shit…” she hisses, “oh God…” She pants for several breaths “I needed to help you.” Eve takes a longer, steadying breath as Shewolf flops onto her left side heavily, and finally, with evident relief, she can reach enough and begins to lick her wound. Eve’s hands are numbing again, and she presses them to the ground to row her body backwards through the snow. She reaches the nearest tree and presses her back against the trunk. She draws her knees up and apart, into a basket. Her chest feels hot and restricted, so she paws impatiently at her coat to pull it open. A breathy rasp, “I needed… I needed to take it out.” She closes her eyes and her head tilts back. Tangled curls meet tree bark. “I took it out for you,” she whispers. “Just don’t run.” Shewolf doesn’t run. For quite some time the only sound to punctuate the eerie silence are Shewolf’s wet lapping tongue and Eve’s breath. In tandem, they slow. At some point, she’s not sure when, Eve’s head lolls to her right and Shewolf has stopped licking to press the left side of her muzzle to the snow, resting. Their eyes snag together again; calming breaths and lazy blinks are shared between them, gazes locked; nothing exists but them; lost together in a dazed, thoughtless trance.

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More time passes in this timeless place and Shewolf rises, stretches, shakes, and comes to Eve’s side by the tree. She stands close to her, and with Eve sitting crossed legged her eyes are level with Shewolf’s. They breathe together as they stare. Eve gives out a shuddery laugh. “That was pretty scary.” But Shewolf lives in this moment; she has already moved on. She is too focused on Eve now. She moves forward into Eve’s space without hesitation, pushes her snout to her face and boops her, a poke of nose to nose. “Hey Shewolf, what are you doing?” Shewolf starts to sniff around Eve, a cold wet nose nudges at the side of her head and starts to snuffle noisily at her neck. “Hey!” Eve tries to push Shewolf back a bit. “Has nobody ever taught you the concept of personal space?” Eve laughs and tilts her head. Shewolf moves back, catches Eve’s eyes in her own hazel gaze and then jauntily lops to the tree on Eve’s right. She stands up on her back legs and scratches the bark of the tree with her front claws leaving deep incised scores in the wood and then immediately lifts a leg and pees around the base. “Nobody ever taught you the concept of privacy either, huh?” Eve starts to laugh and watched the wolf’s movements as she arcs around from the tree on her right to the tree on her left. More scratching. More peeing. Job apparently done, Shewolf returns to Eve and begins sniffing and snuffling again. “Are you quite finished?” Eve buries her face in her ruff and inhales. Shewolf smells of wide-open wilderness and crisp, clean snow to Eve and she smiles grudgingly and rubs behind one ear. “You are just the most beautiful girl. An odd but beautiful girl.” Shewolf practically preens. Eve curls into this moment, the warmth and comfort of it. She sinks her fingers into soft fur and is just saying, “Yeah, I think you think you’re a good girl,” when Shewolf jumps back from her playfully and runs around in a quick circuit. Before she has time to react, Shewolf dashes to Eve, lifts a leg and sprinkles urine on her legs. “Hey! Oh! Come on!” Eve exclaims, jumping up onto her feet and trying to brush off the droplets from her legs. “You pissed on me?” Shewolf sits down and looks up at Eve “What the hell? Bad girl! Why did you piss on me?” Eve crosses her arms and stares down at Shewolf in annoyance, but then the National Geographic narrator from years ago filters into her mind again.

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“Wait a minute…were you… were you marking me?” Eve shouts incredulously. At this moment, Shewolf sprinkles more urine in a wide circle around Eve. _This wolf_ , thinks Eve, _is trying to bond, she thinks I’m her mate_. “Uh, hey! You’ve got the wrong idea here Shewolf. You’re sweet, but you’re, you know…well you’re a wolf. And I’m not the bitch you’re looking for, OK?” Eve laughs. “I can’t believe you pissed on me.” Eve grabs some snow and winces with the cold as she rubs it over her hands. Shewolf sits on her haunches again, regards Eve and then turns her muzzle up, gazing skywards. Eve watches her. Shewolf looks back down into Eve’s eyes and then deliberately, pointedly, slides her gaze up again. _Look up,_ Eve thinks.

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Eve blinks. Following the vertical journey of Shewolf’s gaze, she tilts back her head and drags her eyes up. She gapes open-mouthed as she catches a sight of the most inconceivable beauty in the sky. There, right above them both, a glowing, meandering ribbon of colour is painted across the night sky. The ribbon is of startling green light, with pinks and purples mixing and shifting as it streaks across the starry canvas. “Wha-at?” Eve follows the waving sweep of colour as it curves around her side of the lake, following high above the blue arcing snow-path where it wriggles and writhes amongst the stars above the mountain top. _“Aurora borealis!”_ Eve shouts maniacally to the sky. Shewolf gives a bark. Having always lived in either Connecticut or London she had only ever seen photographs of this happening. It is overwhelmingly beautiful, so much so that Eve temporarily forgets her predicament, she forgets the cold, she forgets all the snow; there is only her now, she and her wolf beneath this blazing rainbow in the wilderness. 

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Eve begins to laugh. It starts as a stunned giggle but soon descends into great echoing, hysterical hoots of laughter that seem to have no end until eventually she is breathless again and is forced to bend slightly, to lean on her knees with her palms. She lifts her eyes to look at Shewolf for a second and gives a snort of disbelief and shakes her head. She doesn’t wait long enough to fully compose herself. She is still in awe and out of breath from the laughter and joy, completely struck with wonder at this natural phenomenon, at this entire situation when she straightens up. Eve watches the ribbons midnight dance in silence; she is made mute by the beauty of it. It is so alive. Eve is alive. Her eyes, glassy with excitement, with emotion, dart back to the spot right above her head again. From here, her gaze slowly traces the luminescent, caressing the colours to its furthest reaches where the end of the ribbon flaps, vibrant and untethered beyond the trees. Then she sees it. It’s just below the end of the ribbon. It beckons her. A small flickering orange globe casts out a gentle, muted yellow halo just inside the arrows of pine about three miles in the distance. A supressed smile twitches one side of Eve’s lips, and she sucks a handful of determined breaths into her lungs, silently thanking whoever is crazy enough to have camped at the edge of this frozen lake in the middle of nowhere. “I’ve heard of the end of the rainbow, but the end of the aurora is a new one on me.” Shewolf, who had been looking at the distant glow, tilts her head at Eve curiously and then pads to her side to nuzzle into her hip. Eve rubs her ears absently while staring ahead toward the light, scanning the aurora twice again in dreamy disbelief. 

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Eve is lost in this timeless moment, carding the long fur of Shewolf’s ruff, colours dancing in her wide-open eyes when she feels claws scratching at her boot. Fur slips through her fingers. Shewolf bolts. “Hey! Hey, no. No, wait!” But she is lunging off ahead of Eve on long legs made for sprinting through deep snow. Shewolf stops once to turn back and look at Eve and then gives one long howl into the sky and takes off again. Pulled into action, Eve sets off, and she doesn’t know whether she is following the aurora, the beacon, or the wolf. In her excitement her legs lunge erratically, and she is stumbling frequently now but laughs each time she does; she is too relieved, she is too thankful to care.

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Staring fixedly at the prize, time seems to warp; to jump. One minute the light is at least three miles away and the next Eve has come to a stop fifty yards from the source. She looks back at the path she cut through the snow, shaking her head in disbelief. Shewolf sits patiently, with her back to Eve, waiting for her. _Where is she?_ Eve draws hungry breaths and paws at the small black curls that have clung to her forehead at her hairline, stuck to her sweat as it froze on her skin. This is no campsite. Nestled in a small clearing at the forest edge is an elevated log cabin. The cabin faces the lake, but pine and broadleaf trees curl round the front, hugging the house, shielding it from view just enough that from a distance nobody would ever see it unless they knew it was here. Eve is close enough now that she can see smoke rising from a chimney. It makes a lazy ascent in the windless night. Some of the smoke, apparently too lazy to rise at all, rolls across the roof to the front of the cabin and swirls around the beacon. The beacon is an orange lantern, swaying almost imperceptibly in the night. Eve inches a little closer to Shewolf as she stares at this little homestead, but Shewolf is staring straight up again. Eve copies her. Directly above the cabin, miles up in the sky, where the ribbon of aurora flaps around untethered, the colours are morphing into red. 

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Eve takes one shuddering breath, licks her dry lips and presses them tightly together. She lets her vision scan the cabin as she approaches, noting all the details and chanting quietly to herself, or perhaps to the wolf, “thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.” She reaches the spot where Shewolf sits, upright and attentive and now completely focused on the cabin. Eve places her palm on Shewolf’s head and rests it there, warming her hand. To the right of the cabin a log store with an apex roof abuts what looks to Eve like a large wooden work shed, or possibly a garage. A pile of snow that has partially melted, presumably in the sun earlier that day, has slipped from the apex and finally slumped to a heap on the ground. The heap hides the bottom of a vast collection of firewood. The lantern is hanging on a long hook that drops down from the leftmost side of the eaves of the roof, glowing enough to light the flight of twelve steps that ascend to the door. A balustraded wrap-around porch is completely sheltered by the generous overhang. To the right edge of the cabin door is a small window. 

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Eve makes off towards the stairs, letting her fingers trail from Shewolf’s head regretfully as she moves away. She instantly misses her warmth. She cautiously climbs the stairs, darting the odd glance around her. When she steps onto the porch she moves to the darkened window. Has she really come all this way to find the cabin empty? _No_ , she thinks, _the owner will be asleep, surely_. She presses her nose against the nearest pane of glass, feels the flat, startling cold of it and then the heat of her own exhaled breath, rebounding against her face. She cups her hands around her eyes to try and block out the light from the lantern behind her in order to see into the darkened space beyond the glass veil. Nothing. She can’t see anything. 

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Eve is starting to really shiver now, her coat is still open, and her sweat has begun to freeze inside her clothes, the chill of it sharp and prickling against the small of her back. She goes to the heavy wooden door and knocks with the side of a fist, impatient already and desperate for shelter. For a long time, the only reply is silence. A muffled scratching sound from behind her draws her attention. She turns back to the edge of the porch and looks down. Shewolf is still there, at the bottom of the stairs, but she is busy. She wines and sniffs and huffs, digging for something in the snow. As the wolf struggles to catch something small and glinting in her teeth, Eve descends the stairs. “What have you got there?” She squats and reaches out her freezing fingers and dusts snow from the treasure. Shewolf sits down, obediently as Eve inspects it. “You found a key…” Eve turns her head to look back up the stairs to the porch. “Hey Shewolf, do you think it counts as breaking and entering if you’re going to freeze to death and there’s possibly nobody home and you have a key?” Eve extends her left arm out to lean on Shewolf and give her soft ruff an affectionate rub only to meet nothing and crash through thin air. Eve topples, like a felled tree, and lands on her side in the snow with a muted ‘ _poomph_ ’. “Shewolf?” she rolls to sit on her heels and looks around her. “Where did you go, you stupid…wolf?” Eve looks at her hand. The key is cold, bright and shining in her palm. She gets up, dusting white powder from her legs, taking one last scan around her for Shewolf. She ascends the stairs, she extends an arm, and points the key. The key fits. The lock turns. The door swings.

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Eve steps forward into a small square entrance hall and places her hand against the wall just inside the door. She closes her eyes and takes a few steadying breaths. To her surprise it suddenly becomes blatantly obvious that the cabin is occupied. Soft music is drifting to her ears, and she can hear the muffled noises of someone moving around. _Oops. So, someone is home_. She keeps her eyes closed, almost as if to block out her embarrassment at the intrusion. She stutters, “Ah h-hello. I…I uh…” She takes a deep breath and sighs, composing herself before she forces some volume into the words. “I-I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean t-to…” Her words trail off as she opens her eyes. Eve is still standing in the hall; her hand is still pressed against the wall, but now she is not alone. There, five yards from Eve’s face stands Villanelle, leaning her right shoulder against a door frame at the threshold of the entrance hall and the room beyond

__

“Eve, you’ve left the door open.” Eve gapes. Too stunned to speak, she turns to her left to look at the door. As she begins to pull the key from the lock, she glances up to scan the outside of the cabin. Perhaps she is looking for the wolf, but instead Eve is confronted with a sea of red. The green, the pink, the purple are all gone; the sky glows in the most vibrant, all-encompassing, shifting red glow. Eve blinks. She turns around, slowly, as if she fears Villanelle might disappear if she moves too fast, and closes the cabin door, carefully, behind her. “Hey, partner.” Villanelle smiles. Eve stares.

__

__

Warm light and a steady waft of heat pour lazily into the dusky hallway from the inner cabin. Villanelle has her hands in the pockets of her tight jeans, one leg straight and the other bent at the knee with one heel kicked over the top of the other foot. She looks pleased. Eve’s jaw hangs open as she looks Villanelle up and down. She shakes her head in confusion and looks back at the closed door, shakes her head again, and prepares to ask… so many questions that are queuing in her brain. This cabin had been in darkness, empty. She had knocked. _When did Villanelle get here? How did Villanelle get here?_

__

__

Villanelle drags her eyes over Eve, taking in her confused expression, and then shakes her head and gives a small, affectionate puff of laughter. “Oh Eve, I know it’s confusing out there in the wilderness, but it always leads here, you know that.” Eve narrows her eyes and purses her lips together, one of her hands makes its way to her hip of its own volition and she gestures around her with the other.

__

“Villanelle?” she says pointedly. Villanelle quirks an eyebrow. “Villanelle… what is this? Why are you…why am I…?” Eve trails off as Villanelle sighs and rolls her eyes before tilting her head back toward the room behind her, signalling Eve to follow her. 

__

“Come on, I’m making us dinner.” Villanelle takes one step backward and flaps her hand in a come-hither motion to beckon Eve deeper into the house. Eve doesn’t move. Her eyebrows knit, her forehead furrows and like a speared fish her mouth opens and closes in several silent, disbelieving gasps. Eve places one finger straight up in front of her face as if urging Villanelle to wait a moment. She turns and opens the cabin door and looks out again. Scarlet sky and crimson snow. She comes back in and shuts the door and turns back to Villanelle. _This doesn’t make sense. None of this makes sense. I’m not supposed to be here_. 

__

__

“Villanelle, how did we both…?” Eve looks at the floor. They had been somewhere else, before this, together, but she couldn’t remember. She tries. Her mind scrambles to sort through a confused mass of threads but they’re twisted and coiled. Eve tries to backtrack in her mind, back through the snowy causeway to recall how she got here; to understand how they _both_ got here. She fumbles blindly in the fragments; she feels the threads, but they snarl in her fingers and tangle more. She tries again, closing her eyes. She could almost see something, a glimpse of them together, shimmering and swaying on the surface of a glassy pool. The water shifts so the memory is too formless, too fluid to see clearly. She reaches out to touch it, to hold the ripples still but her fingers break the surface and chase any clarity away. When the surface is restored the glimpse is gone.

__

__

_I need help here_. Eve looks up at Villanelle “Where did that wolf go?” Eve points back behind her but Villanelle just tilts her head to one side and frowns.

__

“What wolf, Eve?” 

__

“I was with a wolf, I don’t know how, and she was injured, she had s-something… I took it out and I helped her and… w-ell then she pissed on me, but it was OK, we were OK. She was this beautiful… weird-ass wolf and she brought me here. We, we followed the aurora… I think.” Eve thumbs vaguely behind herself at the door. 

__

Villanelle looks at Eve like she is losing her mind. She comes back into the hall. “None of that means anything; it doesn’t matter anymore.” She tries to slide her hand down Eve’s arm to take her hand.

__

“What?” Eve shrugs away from her touch. She needs to make her listen. “No, I saw her! She was, Villanelle, s-she was the most amazing creature. I wish you could have seen… and… and look,” Eve holds out the key, “She _gave me_ this key, this key to this cabin a-and I–”

__

“No Eve. _I_ gave you that key.” Villanelle seems worried.

__

“What? When?”

__

“I gave you the key.” Villanelle looks at Eve like she is being obtuse. “I gave you the key and you opened the door.”

__

This was all wrong. Another disbelieving shake of her head sends a thick, silky black ringlet tumbling down in front of Eve’s right eye. Exasperated, she reaches up and catches the curl, pushing it back up above her hairline and cards her fingers through her hair. After watching this, Villanelle turns away from Eve, lifting her chin skywards, her head falls back and she lets out a short moan followed by an amused snigger, then she drops her head back down, the first touches of a blush on her cheeks. She turns and points at Eve. “I know what you’re doing, Eve,” Villanelle says with a knowing grin. 

__

“Err…what am I doing?” Eve genuinely doesn’t know.

__

“All this?” Villanelle mimics Eve running a hand through her hair. “That thing you do with your hair, you know what it does to me. You know I’ve been here, waiting for you, making us dinner… and you took so long to get here.” Eve sighs out through her nose in mild frustration. “You’re doing that thing with your hair that you know I love, to distract me, to make me not be mad at you. Don’t get me excited right now, dinner is almost ready.” Villanelle winks at Eve salaciously. 

__

__

Something is missing from this picture. Eve is supressing something, squashing it down, hiding it from herself, something big. She watches Villanelle with her mouth open, breathing quick but soft breaths.

__

__

Villanelle turns away and takes four languid, swaying steps into the room beyond and twists half of her body round to take a seductive look back at Eve before sauntering to the left out of sight. A beat in Eve’s chest startles her; time folds, Eve slides. The sensation of long fingers sweeping lightly against her wrist and hand, a faint whispering touch; Villanelle looking back at her, beckoning her, just like this but in another place, another time, another plane. The air vanishes from Eve’s lungs before her heart seems to stutter again. Three uneven heartbeats drum quickly against her ribs. A jolt of recognition, a sting of desperate wanting. The fragments are trying to coalesce in her mind like pieces of broken glass but touching them prickles sharply, and when she tries to clutch at them, piece them together, she feels a jagged edge bite; she feels like it cuts her, on her side and on her palm. The fragments fall away. 

__

__

_Wait_. Villanelle was talking about dinner. “What dinner?” Eve suddenly shouts in frustration to Villanelle from the hall. _Tonight, I can make us dinner_. A blink. Another fold, but then Eve is standing in the middle of a large open-plan living space watching Villanelle. 

__

Villanelle has removed her sweater and is in the kitchen area stirring a wide but shallow saucepan with a wooden spoon. Watching Villanelle doing something so normal and domestic is odd enough, but something else is bothering Eve. She takes a moment to really look at what Villanelle is wearing. Villanelle has on the most touristy, tacky t-shirt that Eve has ever seen. It’s so off-key, so jarring to Eve and so quintessentially anti-Villanelle and everything she stands for. It’s oversized, the hem reaching below Villanelle’s denim-clad hips, and its primary colour is navy blue. Traversing this blue fabric landscape, the words ‘ _See The Aurora In ALASKA!_ ’ span the chest. Most of the letters are made from a patchwork of neon-like metallic fabrics in lime green, pink, purple and red. The colours all compete offensively for the eye’s attention until the final word ‘ _ALASKA!_ ’ jumps out boldly below them in pure, bright white. Eve can’t quite believe what she is seeing, but then she remembers that Villanelle hasn’t answered her. “Villanelle. Why are you making me dinner?” 

__

“This is what you wanted,” says Villanelle by way of explanation. Villanelle’s words are delivered gently, her voice affectionate, but when the words reach Eve’s ears they hit something sharply, reverberating back from the recesses of her memory. She’s sliding again. Eve has heard Villanelle say these words before, but in frustration, in anger, and in pain. She doesn’t want to understand or feel the pain, so she shakes away the feeling, this uneasy sensation of Déjà vu. 

__

Villanelle moves around the kitchen fluently as though this entire open-plan room were simply an extension of her body. She inhabits the very walls of this cabin as if it were her skin. And despite the un-characteristic T-shirt, the very essence of Villanelle fills this space. Tendrils of steam curl up and dissipate gently in a smoky halo around Villanelle’s head. The heat and moisture have made the tiny wisps of baby-soft hair at her hairline curl and fray. Eve studies the wisps, and the gentle upturn of Villanelle’s lips as she hums and begins to mouth out halting, raspy lyrics of a song. A deeper pot gently simmers at the back of the stove, adding a gentle _pat, pat, pat_ as the lid putters away, letting out the steam as percussion to the background music playing softly in the cabin. Villanelle turns her head to look at Eve and smiles warmly. “Do you like it? The song?” Villanelle stretches her arm out, pointing her wooden spoon and gently nodding the end of it, causing shiny red droplets to glide out on a downward trajectory in the general direction of Eve. Eve looks at the droplets, little tailed comets of… _what? Blood? No, not blood_. Eve inhales deeply. Tomato sauce, a rich ragu. “Eve? The song,” Villanelle reminds Eve, snapping her out of that place in her mind where she is tangled in threads again. Villanelle nods her head to indicate a large wooden sideboard to Eve’s right and suddenly Eve understands what Villanelle wants her to see. 

__

Eve steps closer to the sideboard and stoops slightly to read the screen of an iPod cradled in a speaker station, the soft guitar chords of a song called ‘K’ by Cigarettes After Sex is playing. Eve runs her hand along the sideboard, which at first glance had seemed quite rustic, but now, up close, she can see and feel tiny hand-carved roses all over the wood. They snake along the horizontal surface; they ramble up and down the doors of the lower cupboards and cheerily weave and climb the edges of the bookcase on top. It really is an exquisite piece of furniture. Eve gets lost somewhere as her fingers trace the meandering vines, outlining the petals of the wooden roses as Villanelle’s voice sings along to the iPod. Villanelle’s key is slightly sharp, the words quiet and hazy as if Eve hears them through a heavy fog. 

__

“ _And I'm kissing you lying in my room,_  
_Holding you until you fall asleep,_  
_And it's just as good as I knew it would be_ ,  
_Stay with me I don't want you to leave._ ” 

______

Eve can still feel a vague shifting sensation inside; pieces of different places, different times, past moments in her mind. Such a mass of threads of memory, ends folded and frayed, just out of her reach where she can’t pull on them, smooth them out and weave them back together. 

____

____

Her attention suddenly snaps back to Villanelle, who seems to have forgotten that she had asked Eve’s opinion on the song. Eve watches her rummaging noisily in drawers and cupboards, lining up a pile of cutlery, two forks and two spoons before taking out two plates and two wine glasses. Eve scans the cabin and realises that, without ever taking it off, her puffy thick winter coat is hanging on a peg by the door, dripping gently. She looks down at her body, her hands are clean, she is dry, and warm. Her eyes travel from her hands down her legs and, _What?_ On her feet are two slippers; big, stupid, comedy slippers. “What the fuck am I wearing?” Eve mumbles to herself in disbelief. Villanelle looks back at her quickly and chuckles to herself. She empties the contents of the deep saucepan into a colander in the sink before she turns around to put the saucepan on a glass tile. She appraises Eve where she stands. “I did tell you not to wear those things. That’s so stupid. Why would you want it to look like two beagles have swallowed your feet? What if you trip over them? What if you fall down the stairs? You look cute by the way, but they are just NOT practical.” Villanelle busies herself again. She sweeps around the kitchen majestically, pulling a chilled golden bottle of Louis Roederer Cristal from the fridge before bringing out a large ceramic bowl. She crosses back to the stove and brings the wooden spoon to her mouth, blows on it and sneaks a tiny taste, giving a little squeal of approval at her own work. Eve feels butterflies when she hears that sound, but she is distracted by her boots lying on the hearth, drying in front of the roaring flames in the fireplace.

____

“When did I..?” 

____

Villanelle interrupts her, “Do you want me to set the table?” Villanelle wiggles the bottle cork. 

____

“No!” Eve insists loudly, without knowing why. The cork pops and that Déjà Vu feeling skitters over her skin again.

____

“Well, you better hurry, don’t let this go cold,” Villanelle chides Eve gently with a wink as she spoons the rich, dark red sauce over the large bowl of spaghetti. Even in that dumb Alaska t-shirt, she is so incredibly beautiful; her hair falling out of the centre of a loose, low bun; her eyes sparkling in smooth skin, all warmth and steam-pinked cheeks. Eve’s eyes dart over Villanelle as she makes her way, dazed, to the counter.

____

____

Eve finishes setting the table just as Villanelle walks over to join her with considerable pomp and ceremony. Eve’s eyes flit around the cabin once more, caressing this hidden place full of light, and warmth, and life, and Villanelle. Spaghetti glistens and steams in the ceramic bowl Villanelle holds at the end of outstretched arms. She presents the bowl with ironic solemnity; an offering, in the middle of the round wooden table and then beams up proudly at Eve. She pulls out her chair, sits down and slides the bowl slightly closer to Eve’s side of the table, wiggles her eyebrows and holds out some tongs. “Please,” she urges Eve to take her portion. Eve looks at the bowl, then up at Villanelle and pulls out her chair, but she doesn’t sit. 

____

“Villanelle, please. What are we doing here?” she asks, looking around the cabin. 

____

____

She lets her eyes traverse the wooden staircase at the very back of the cabin and lifts her gaze up further. Held up by thick oak columns, stretching the length of the back wall of the cabin, a platform is perched, overlooking the living space below. Eve can see the bottom end of an elaborately carved wooden bedstead. More roses. Two thorny vines snake from each corner and meet in the middle, with the two largest roses, one from each vine, crossing and intertwining. Eve can just make out a clothes rail on one side of the platform, stuffed tightly with clothes, none of which look suitable for snow. Looking past the bed and the clothes, and… yes, an overfilled shoe rack, Eve spots the curved edge of a circular window in a dormer, a porthole to the snowy world outside. Her eyes follow the thick beams in the ceiling that meet in the highest point of the pitched roof, right in the middle above the dining table, and she sighs slowly as she turns to take in a brown overstuffed couch that slumps near the fireplace with a velvety red blanket draped casually over the back. The seats are littered in sumptuous gold and red throw cushions. No part of any of this made sense, but the spaghetti smelled so good and, oh, Eve could just sit here and eat with Villanelle and afterward they could go to the couch; flopping down in front of the fire, wrapping themselves together in the velvet blanket with a glass of wine each. Then maybe Villanelle would… _nobody would bother us_. Eve clamps something shut.

____

She snaps her eyes back to the table. “Villanelle what is this place?” but villanelle has got bored of Eve staring around in a trance and has begun to pile spaghetti and sauce onto her plate. “And what the hell are you even wearing? What’s with the t-shirt?” Eve looks again at the cheap, touristy, and frankly completely out-of-character t-shirt Villanelle is wearing. Villanelle ignores that and sucks an errant strand of pasta into her mouth and licks her lips.

____

“Do you know what is happening when we see the Northern Lights, Eve?” She pours Champagne into Eve’s glass and then her own. _What is she even talking about now?_

____

This pisses Eve off, and her eyes narrow. “What?”

____

“The Northern Lights,” Villanelle repeats patiently. “Aurora Borealis?” She performs a sort of jazz-hands gesture to illustrate a path across the sky as she says the words again as if this somehow explains the non-sequitur. “It’s so amazing…” Eve shakes her head and eyes Villanelle, hoping she will realise that Eve is more pressed by what is going on here, because surely at some point Villanelle is going to acknowledge that something is wrong here. “It is caused by a solar storm.” 

____

Eve looks at Villanelle and sighs. “OK?”

____

“Well, these storms, they are caused when parts of one magnetic body interacts with another in an explosive way, you know?” Eve is fairly sure she doesn’t know. Villanelle takes a sip of wine and continues. “OK, so the Earth is caught in the sun’s gravity. It’s just orbiting round and round endlessly, and the sun is super-hot and radioactive.” Villanelle licks some errant sauce from her thumb. “The sun, it’s just too hot, it’s pretty volatile actually… well, anyway it is so hot and unstable it does this thing called coronal mass ejection? It is a kind of wind, a wind made of the sun, all the hot excitable parts, and it blasts out into space, right toward Earth.” Eve can’t fathom where she is going with this, but keeps listening as Villanelle stops to shovel some spaghetti into her mouth, chews quickly and continues through a full mouth. “But earth is not so stable itself.” Villanelle looks Eve right in the eyes as she says this, then back at her plate as she continues, “People think it is stable, that it’s just there, existing. Boring, right? Spinning around and around day after day pulled around the sun year after year, and neither can touch. But Earth has her own stuff going on. It has a magnetosphere and it’s full of all sorts of particles that are all charged up and excited.” Villanelle stops to drag her gaze down Eve’s body and back up once. “The negative; the positive, all thrumming; and there’s water too, all over the atmosphere.” Villanelle looks up at the ceiling. “And when the charged particles from the sun reach Earth they are drawn into her pull, sucked in. Devoured. Pieces of the sun hit pieces of the Earth; a collision, high up in the sky, and these pieces just collectively lose their shit.” Villanelle waves a forkful of spaghetti in circles. “They swirl and dance around each other, accelerating, decelerating, rubbing together, swapping charges, giving and taking energies.” Villanelle looks at Eve again and licks sauce from her lips. “Eventually, they excite each other so much it creates the most beautiful, complex bands of light; together, their magnetism just lights up the whole fucking sky.” Villanelle shakes her head and gives a small laugh out through her nostrils as if she is truly inspired by her own story and closes her lips over her fork and slides it back out to lay it on her plate with a clink. Eve watches her chew, in complete silence. Villanelle swallows and then takes a long drink of her Champagne, looking up at Eve over the top of her glass. Villanelle moves her tongue around her mouth, while Eve wonders what to do with all this. As Villanelle places her glass carefully back on the table, she licks her lips again and takes a drawn-out quivering breath. “The most energetic and violent collisions are red. They are the most beautiful too. They twist and ripple higher in the sky than any other aurora and send down these columns of crimson and writhing waves of scarlet. The blood aurora. Do you understand how rare that is, Eve?” Villanelle leans back in her chair and crosses her legs. There’s something lascivious about the way she does it, the way she stares.

____

____

Eve is struggling to locate the point of all this and settles on, “This is all fascinating,” followed by an intake of breath and, “Villanelle, why are you telling me all this? Why am I here? Why are you here? And why the fuck are you wearing that thing? That’s not even you.” 

____

Villanelle looks down at her chest “Bingo!” She rolls her eyes. “You’re right, this is not me. Eve, I just think that if you come to Alaska and see the aurora you should at least try to understand.” 

____

“Understand what? Villanelle, I don’t understand; I don’t understand _any_ of this.”

____

“What do you think is happening here?” Villanelle speaks but Eve hears the words in her own voice, rebounding in her head, pushing, demanding. “You know, Eve. You know exactly what this is.” Villanelle says this so levelly and earnestly that for a beat Eve hears her own voice whisper to herself, you do. “You can’t keep coming here. Mon Dieu, every night you come here…” Eve’s stitch is back again, pinching and gnawing. “You should have come when it mattered.” Villanelle lifts her glass to her lips again and just before she drinks she looks down into the glass and whispers, “You should have come when I asked.” 

____

____

The clawing pain near Eve’s side is becoming hard to ignore, but now she feels scratching at her feet. A tiny, pitiful mewling sound rises to her ears from somewhere below. “Eve, aren’t you going to pick her up?” Villanelle says, uncrossing her legs and pushing her plate away to lean her elbow on the table. _It’s happening again_ , Eve thinks as dread begins to curl around her like smoke. As Villanelle sets her chin on her knuckles to regard her blankly, Eve hesitantly tears her eyes away from Villanelle and looks down, down, down to her feet. There, a tiny white kitten frolics with one beagle. It wrestles one long floppy ear, savaging its fabric foe. It reverses and lunges again, fiercely, and manages to scrabble and scramble up onto Eve’s foot using its little claws. In all the excitement the kitten rolls right off the other side of the slipper and onto its back. Its attention is caught by one of its own back paws, it captures it in both front paws and remains lying on its back, chewing toe-beans. 

____

“Oh!” Eve exclaims as she scoops down to sweep the kitten up into her hands. “How did you get in here?” she asks lifting the kitten to eye level to admire it.

____

“You keep her here, with me, waiting for you to come home.”

____

Eve is absolutely certain she’s never seen this kitten before in her life. She curls it to her chest, cradling her. “She’s yours?”

____

“No, she’s yours. She used to be mine, but you took her.”

____

Eve can’t make any of this fit. “Do we share her?” Eve looks back down at the kitten and smiles. The little mewls are so sad and pitiful that Eve finds the noise slightly distressing and another stabbing twinge grips at her side. 

____

Villanelle’s face looks serene for a moment. The way she looks into Eve’s eyes is so intense, but so still. She breathes in and out steadily through her nose at Eve and then smiles, almost sadly. _This is where I remember_ , Eve thinks. The dread curls tighter.

____

Eve takes a deep breath, and it hitches slightly with the stitch. As she is drawn deeper into Villanelle’s stare, something comes lose around her, like the walls of the cabin are unstitching at the seams, falling apart and slipping away. “Villanelle, why are we here? I don’t remember how I got here; I don’t remember how I ended up in the snow meeting that wolf–”

____

“Oh, the Wolf is me. Come _on_ , Eve,” Villanelle cuts her off and laughs dismissively as she pours more Champagne into her own glass.

____

“What? What do you mean the wolf is you?”

____

“I don’t know, Eve, you made this place, you figure it out, do the mental leg-work.” Villanelle sniggers and Eve screws up her face, trying to grasp her meaning. “Ugh, Eve, I gave you the key. In Rome.”

____

_Rome_. Eve feels the fold and as she slides this time, she jolts. She sees them both, together, standing there, where the ancient ruins rose around them; and where they fell apart. 

____

“You should have used the key. Then. Instead of now. You keep me suspended here, waiting for you, and every night you unlock that door to glimpse what we should have had, but all you can see is what went wrong.” Villanelle taps the side of her head with one finger and raises an eyebrow. “How’s that working out for you, baby?” The curling dread, it snakes into her body and wraps around all that she keeps locked inside. It tries to pull the memories to the surface, boils them until they are bubbling up from within; welling and bulging slowly.

____

“Rome…” Eve trails off. She starts to feel her chest tighten, and as she stares at Villanelle’s eyes, black pleading with hazel, Eve notices the rise and fall in Villanelle’s chest, mirroring her own; they are both becoming breathless. They pulse and breathe together, bound together. They are stuck in this circle, this orbit that’s been turning in time, taking them to this same place over and over. She feels the ends of those tangled threads again, taunting her, floating in and out of her grasp; an end here, an end there. Eve’s hands clench a little as she stares into Villanelle’s eyes. Staring back, Villanelle starts to push herself away from the table using both palms, sliding her chair backwards. 

____

____

Eve pinches a thread; clasps an image in her mind of the wolf, those eyes, spearing into her soul, pleading _don’t hurt me_. They morph into Villanelle lying beneath her on a bed as Eve draws a knife out of her body; the wolf yelps, Villanelle screams. A flicker and the image is gone again and Eve hears the chair being pushed back under the table, scraping for her attention. The inching panic has crawled up her chest now, swelling into her lungs, cold and hard. Villanelle slowly walks around the table to stand in front of Eve, and Eve pivots slightly to face her. “Oksana, Paris… I–”

____

“Shhhh…” Villanelle places a finger on Eve’s lips to silence her, but her face is pained.

____

____

Eve is suddenly compelled to search for something, to look down Villanelle’s body. Her mouth falls open as she sees a growing patch of red seep through the pure white lettering of ‘ _ALASKA_!’ on the t-shirt. Eve’s hands start clenching near her chest as she watches Villanelle’s blood bloom and spread. She begins to feel liquid hotness surge and seep through her own fingers. Eve and Villanelle still stare, captivated in a frightening, painful rapture. They are panting; it is Villanelle who bleeds, but Eve can feel it. That stitch. _That fucking stitch_. She grips her hands tighter with the pain of it, trying to gain a proper breath. The pain doesn’t stop, and Eve’s anxiety starts to crescendo from her chest to her throat. Villanelle tilts her head. A veil drops; her face goes blank, her eyes empty, the hazel drained of life. 

____

“I told you not to break my heart.” Villanelle’s starts to regard something on Eve’s chest, curious but cold. Eve’s horror mounts as she remembers. She clenches her jaw and grinds her teeth as she looks down. The kitten is still clutched in her hands, but her fur is all red and she doesn’t move; she doesn’t breathe. Eve doesn’t cry out. She begins to hyperventilate, great, rolling, tidal breaths wave in and out of her lungs as she drops the kitten, bloody and boneless, to the floor. All Eve can hear is her own breath, her own pulse roaring in her ears until Villanelle’s question nudges her gently, “How did it feel?”

____

Eve looks back up at Villanelle, but she only stares impassively at the lifeless little body on the floor. Eve looks at her hands, both palms are stained red, rills of it drip from between her fingers. “Wet,” she says absently. She feels it on her body too, seeping and warm. Eve looks down slowly to her abdomen. The stitch. Blood oozes and rises through her top. 

____

Eve tastes copper as Villanelle speaks her final deadened words, “I thought you were special.”

____

Eve wakes suddenly and lurches up to sitting position as the sound of the gunshot rebounds around her head and she feels the pain of a bullet cutting through skin, muscle and sinew. She holds her palm to her exit wound, gasping for breath as she tries to extricate her feet from wet sheets. She kicks at them in frustration and flings her legs over the side of her bed, ripping her soaked vest up her body and over her head, hurling it across the room to the floor. Laboured breaths punctuate the midnight sounds filtering in through the single window of her East London bedsit. The light of a streetlamp streams through the net curtain of the single sash window, its dirty orange glow makes the place seem darker. This street never sleeps. An argument is brewing; Eve ignores the raised voices, the tinkling of broken glass and the roar of the hourly nightbus outside as she runs the tip of her finger over the wound on her left side. The scar is keloid and stretched after six months of healing and Eve rubs circles over it as she stares at the floor. She starts to shiver as the sweat chills on her skin. She reaches for her phone. It’s 04:03. 

____

Eve doesn’t start at the Korean takeaway until lunch time. She scrapes her fingers through her hair, snagging a nail on a ringlet that has clumped and knotted with sweat as she tossed and turned. Curling forward, elbows on her knees, she rubs her eyes with the heels of her palms, trying to wipe her face from her mind. “Oksana,” she pants out in frustration. As her breathing begins to slow.

____

Eve stands stiffly, clenches her jaw and stalks to the tiny bathroom. She turns on the shower and climbs under the spray, palms pressed flat to cold tiles while the water cascades over her. If she could only wash the dreams away. She wonders if she has the stamina to take another day of this. Another shift of food-prep monotony; another return to this shitty bedsit alone, another night of fitful sleep, chasing the aurora, trudging through Alaska; to the cabin, and to her.

____

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first publication of a fanfic and is a gift for my buddy Lostgirl966. My thanks to Centauri2002 who provided proof and editing for this chapter to help get me started on this journey. Please excuse the slightly rambling first act of this chapter, I hope to improve as I progress through the story, which is just my conjecture / fantasies on what Season 3 Killing Eve could be.


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